Usability in practice - Aligning business objectives and user goals
– posted December 20th, 2006 by Clodagh Kelly No comments
As one of the newest members of the iQ Content team, I have recently been assigned to my first major project - the re design of a major public sector website.
The experience has been both an invaluable learning experience and an eye opener as to how a large organisation with ample resources in terms of both finance and staff can still not deliver a usable, helpful website.
Phase 1 - User analysis
Led by my colleagues, John Wood and Laurence Veale, the first phase of the project looked at how well the website served the organisation’s customers. Extensive user analysis and comprehensive site evaluation revealed many serious problems in terms of content, findability, ease of use, and provision of online servicesresulting in … frustrated and unhappy customers.
Phase 2 - Establishing Business objectives
The next phase of the project, led by Colman Walsh, and aided by myself, looked at how well the website delivered on the organisation’s business objectives — with regard to increased efficiency, cost savings, employee productivity and satisfaction.
Part of this process involved conducting interviews with stakeholders in the organisation in order to establish the business objectives for the website. We interviewed a large number of people from various departments on site at the client’s offices.
Each interview was conducted using a similar format; having established the interviewee’s position and responsibilities within the organisation, we then asked them what they and their department thought of the website and how it was being used.
Responses were overwhelmingly and resoundingly negative.
Over and over again, we heard reports of the website being confusing, difficult to use, badly organised, lacking good quality content and generally failing to provide useful tools for the business or user.
One interviewee declared “You’d need to be a genius to find anything on the site”.
I was astounded that the organisation was consistently failing to get even the basics right on their website — this was in spite of significant investment in technology and widespread staff support and enthusiasm.
So how can a major public sector website with ample resources fail so badly?
Rather than there being a single over riding factor, it would appear the failure resulted from problems in a number of areas within the organisation.
A lack of ownership of the website and poorly defined roles within the organisation reflects in the confused structure of the site. A lack of any clear guidance has resulted in staff adding content in an ad-hoc manner wherever they are able to, rather in accordance with defined guidelines.
The poor structure and categorisation of content on the site reflects the need for a user centred design process which is clearly missing from the current design. This process would help to align the business objectives and user goals, resulting in a website that satisfies the needs of both the business and the user.
Another key to the failure was the dearth of trained and/or experienced web writers and editors. Most of the staff we met admitted to having received no training in writing for the web, and little in use of the CMS, resulting in poorly written content, and little incentive to be imaginative or creative.
Big organisations need a clear web strategy
This experience has clearly demonstrated to me the obvious need for a clear web strategy which outlines well defined objectives and processes for the organisation. This is true for every organisation and every website, but especially important for large public sector organisations whose primary goal is to serve the public.
Recognising the need for a user-centric design process
This story has a happy ending, the client has recognised the need to focus design on users and our frameowork allows them to do this while still delivering on the core objectives of the organisation.
Local government in the UK are streets ahead
In the UK, they have recognised the need for well organised, usable websites in the public sector and local authorities collaborated to produce the Local Government Category List (LGCL) - an initiative that created common information categories for all UK local government websites. This encourages all councils to adopt a common categorization of information which makes it significantly easier for information to be shared and searched by the public.
Ireland needs to catch up..
Here in Ireland, we are a long way from the LGCL, but our hope is that in the meantime, more organizations, in both public and private sector, will recognise the need for user centred design processes, and the importance of a well planned, well defined, user centred web strategy.
